<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="simrobothelp.css">
<title>Overview</title>
</head>
<body>

<table width="100%">
	<tr>
		<td rowspan="2" width="5%"><img alt="logo" src="Icons/SimRobot.png"></td>
		<td valign="middle" align="right"><div class="title">Overview</div></td>
	</tr>
	<tr valign="top">
		<td><hr></td>
	</tr>
</table>

<h3>What is SimRobot?</h3>

<p>
This help describes SimRobot, a robot simulator which is able to simulate
arbitrary user-defined robots in three-dimensional space. It includes a
physical model which is based on rigid body dynamics. To allow an extensive
flexibility in building accurate models, a variety of different generic bodies,
sensors and actuators has been implemented. Furthermore, the simulator follows
an user-oriented approach by including several mechanisms for visualization,
direct actuator manipulation, and interaction with the simulated world. To
demonstrate the general approach, severale examples of different robots, which
have been simulated so far, are also presented (see Examples section).
</p>

<p>
The simulator is not limited to any special class of mobile robots . By using an XML-based
modeling language, users are enabled to specify robots and their environments completely
without any additional use of other programming languages. A large set of body elements,
actuators and generic sensors allows the free composition of arbitrary robot models. An
important element of simulations, which is ignored in many cases, is the support of the
work of the user. This is addressed by SimRobot by providing several possibilities of
visualization and interaction with the simulated world.
</p>

<p>
To simulate rigid body dynamics, SimRobot also uses ODE, since this engine
has a wide variety of features and has been used successfully in many other
projects. The visualization as well as the computation of imaging sensor data is
based on OpenGL, because this industry standard offers the best performance
on modern hardware on different platforms.
</p>

</body>
</html>